Involved Fatherhood

Involved Dads Are The Best Dads - It's Time To Give Them Some Credit

Two months ago, Daniel Murphy of the New York Mets became the 100th baseball player to make use of Major League Baseball’s 72-hour paternity leave policy, which was enacted before the 2011 season.

Most other players’ leaves flew under the radar. However, Murphy was publicly vilified by two prominent sports radio personalities. Their implication was, “How dare a man prioritize family over work, even for 72 hours. He doesn’t even have breasts!!!”

This whole incident was revelatory in that, while it is an open secret that many men want to be, and increasingly are, hands-on fathers, they still can’t be seen as violating the “man code” of being first, always and forever a breadwinner and only secondarily a parent. And this even applies to fortunate dads like Murphy, who have financial means and employers willing to support them. There is a strange wall of silence that has built up over the issue of involved fathers working hard to juggle work and family demands.

This is madness! Involved fatherhood is and should be considered completely normal. Yet, until very recently, involved dads have been alternately ignored or overly celebrated as doing something exceptional.

As a busy involved father who also works hard in my career, I resent both being ignored and being given too much credit for being a hands-on parent. Please don’t call me a “superdad” because my wife and I worked out a way to be equal co-parents. I’m just doing what the vast majority of my peers do every day — working to provide for my family, supporting my wife’s career, and spending lots of quality time caring for and pouring myself into my kids. Dads’ everyday efforts are completely normal.

Why don’t more people recognize this? I blame the wall of silence.

As a society, we don’t talk enough about the work-family life challengesfathers confront, and we fail to recognize that so many dads are running themselves ragged to succeed both in their careers and in their families. A little support from employers, public policy and society would be nice.

Because we don’t talk about fathers’ work-family challenges at the workplace, managers have not had to confront these concerns. As a result, very few employers offer paternity leave or other forms of work-family flexibility programs (telecommuting, flextime and so on) to men. Even when companies offer these policies, most dads fear adverse career consequences (with good reason) — and, as a result, don’t utilize them. In fact, even among high-income white-collar workers, about 75% of dads cobble togethera week or less of accumulated sick, vacation or personal days when their children are born. And this is in the professional sector, in which dads are most likely to have job security, understanding bosses and financial means. Most hourly waged workers could only dream of extended paternity leaves.

The fear of career consequences even extends to employers who repeatedly have won accolades for flexibility and family-friendliness. I have a friend at a company that was recently ranked as having the most generous paternity leave policy among Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For. In the months before his wife was due to give birth, he asked around about paternity leave options, and his supervisors and coworkers told him he certainly could take his full 12 weeks of leave, but that it would be “career suicide” to do so (to his credit, he took the full offered leave).